Print publishing has fallen to less than half of the business which once called itself Australian Provincial Newspapers... and which will close yet another print site this year.
Yet the evolution has made APN News & Media - and its chief executive Michael Miller - the darling of analysts and investors, with shares rising last week on the strength of quadrupled net profits.
Miller has also been talking about a new content marketing business called Emotive - in which it will have a majority stake - which has APN's streaming radio platform iHeartRadio as its first client.
Perhaps because investors don't want to hear about print, details from the presentation emphasise growth in 'sexy' areas such as radio and digital publishing, and one chart even suggests print is growing.
And while the full-year market presentation discloses that the Toowoomba print site is being closed, there's less mention that newspaper printing is being resumed in nearby Warwick after a pause of several years.
At the Warwick Daily News site, where an elderly Harris Cottrell V15 was shut down almost a decade ago, sheetfed production had continued with an upgrade to its offset equipment. Now a mothballed Manugraph Cityline press from Ballina is being installed there and will take on some of the work from Toowoomba.
The Toowoomba print site was upgraded as part of a comprehensive programme in 2006/7 which addressed out-of-date plant at the sites acquired with the 1988 formation of APN. It was one of four new sites equipped with Manugraph presses, all but one of which have closed or are closing.
Production will now rest with Rockhampton, Warwick and the productive coldset-heatset plant at Yandina - with its hybrid manroland Regioman/Uniset pressline -opened at the end of 2006 at a cost of 2006.
The six-tower Cityline replaced a Harris N845 installed by Toowoomba Newspapers, the business formed by the 1970 merger of the Chronicle with 1955 rival Downs Star.
New Manugraph presses were also installed in Bundaberg - the first to open and also the first to close - Rockhampton and Ballina.
While achieving savings in staff costs, the changes come at a cost. Some of that will be in the group's $12.4 million of one-off project costs (also attributed to costs of refinancing and NZME). Not to mention redundancies, asset write-downs and business closures of $17.3 million (albeit a more modest total than last year's $23.2 million) and a whopping almost $50 million of write-offs on intangibles, presumably goodwill.
However figures for Australian Regional Media show a $10 million reduction in operations and administrative costs.
Even with reported 11 per cent growth in digital earnings, a substantial increase in APN's radio business means publishing revenue fell from 56 per cent to 38 per cent of earnings in 2014 (advertising revenue fell seven per cent in 2014 and 15 per cent in 2013)... but that doesn't mean the group is giving up on print yet.
Its report says weekly print readership - not the same thing as copy sales - has grown 3.4 per cent, and claims circulation performance is "22 per cent better than the industry". And it has also been shopping, adding small, local newspaper acquisitions at "attractive multiples".
APN's print story is a reflection of huge changes which have taken place in Australia's newspaper industry in not much more than a decade. That said, upgrade of the Toowoomba print site - now the fourth to close in as many years - has helped keep the group's newspapers relevant, and may yet stave off the day when print is no longer viable.
Peter Coleman
Above: Happier days at the opening of the Toowoomba press in June 2008, APN Print general manager regional operations Gary Osborne , State attorney general Kerry Shine and print manager John Selman
On our website: Rohan Gosstray at the Toowoomba opening (Pictures APN/Bev Lacey)